Wellbeing: A Complete Reference Guide, Volume V, Economics of Wellbeing

5

The Impact of the Great Recession on Economic Wellbeing

How Different Are OECD Nations and Why?

Lars Osberg

Dalhousie University, Canada

Andrew Sharpe

Centre for the Study of Living Standards, Canada

Introduction

Since 1998, the Centre for the Study of Living Standards has published the Index of Economic Wellbeing (IEWB) (Osberg & Sharpe, 1998, 2002a, 2002b),¹ which attempts to estimate the level and trend of aggregate economic wellbeing in Canada and other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations (Osberg & Sharpe, 2006). However, in September 2008 the global economy sank into recession and the long-run trend in some (but not all) countries became dominated by short-run shocks. The sudden onset of the global recession, and the particular combination of financial crisis and real economy decline that has characterized this recession, raises many questions for the measurement of aggregate economic wellbeing.

This chapter presents estimates of the IEWB for Australia*, Belgium, Canada*, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany*, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway*, Spain, Sweden*, the United Kingdom* and the United States* between 1995 and 2010.² However, because discussion of 14 different countries rapidly becomes very unwieldy, we focus initially on four nations—the United States, Canada, Germany, and Spain. These particular countries are chosen because within both the “Anglo” and “Continental European” welfare state regimes one can observe great variation in the ...